Dan Gutman’s My Weirdest School 12, Ms Hall Is a Goofball, is a very silly school story for 6 year olds about a lunch lady on a mission to make everybody eat vegetables.<\/p>\n
A.J. hates vegetables. A.J. hates most things, to be fair, but vegetables are top of the list.<\/p>\n
Then the new lunch lady roller-skates into his classroom wearing a hairnet, announces that lunch is the most important meal of the day, and starts handing out salad.<\/p>\n
So A.J. founds the Veggie Haters Club. Andrea, who loves everything he hates, immediately founds the Veggie Lovers Club. There are protest signs. LETTUCE NOT EAT VEGGIES is my favourite.<\/p>\n
What follows is Ms Hall trying absolutely everything. Vegetable trading cards. Twinkies with the cream scooped out and vegetables put in. A rap performed by a former music teacher who left to be famous. Juggling knives on roller skates. Actual bribery, which she cheerfully admits is bribery.<\/p>\n
And one by one, A.J.’s friends fall.<\/p>\n
The comedy is all in A.J.’s head. He takes every phrase absolutely literally, so a whole chapter is just the lunch lady using food idioms at him while he wonders what beans she’s spilled and where the pickle is that she’s in. If your reader is at the age where jokes about words are suddenly the funniest thing in the world, this is a direct hit.<\/p>\n
It’s also a short book with very short chapters, which makes it a good one for a child who wants to finish something in a sitting or two.<\/p>\n
One thing to flag. In the first chapter the old lunch lady leaves because she is being deported, which one of the children looks up and explains as sending people back where they came from. It’s played as a joke, it isn’t mentioned again, and a six-year-old will almost certainly read straight past it. But it’s there, so you may want to know before it turns up at the tea table as a question.<\/p>\n
The rest is harmless. The teachers are ridiculous rather than mean, nobody is really bullied, and A.J.’s constant “I will never speak to you again for the rest of my life” lasts about a page and a half each time.<\/p>\n
This is the twelfth in its series, and you can start anywhere. The narrator and the school are the same across them, and if this one goes down well, Ms. Hannah Is Bananas puts A.J. in the same seat with the same friends being made to do art with an art teacher who wears dresses made out of oven gloves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dan Gutman’s My Weirdest School 12, Ms Hall Is a Goofball, is a very silly school story for 6 year olds about a lunch lady on a mission to make everybody eat vegetables. A.J. hates vegetables. A.J. hates most things, to be fair, but vegetables are top of the list. Then the new lunch lady […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11407,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":8209,"lr_next_read_anchor":"Ms. Hannah Is Bananas","lr_seo_hook":"A roller-skating lunch lady declares war on one boy's hatred of veggies."},"book_tag":[23],"age_group":[31],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[221],"class_list":["post-8211","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-funny-books","age_group-books-for-6-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-dan-gutman"],"yoast_title":"My Weirdest School 12 – Ms. Hall Is a Goofball! by Dan Gutman | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A roller-skating lunch lady declares war on one boy's hatred of veggies. For ages 6+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n